Senior Software Engineer, Notebooks, Education at Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (Redwood City, CA)

Founded by Dr. Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg in 2015, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) is a new kind of philanthropy that’s leveraging technology to help solve some of the world’s toughest challenges – from eradicating disease, to improving education, to reforming the criminal justice system. Across three core Initiative focus areas of Science, Education and Justice and Opportunity,  we’re pairing engineering with grantmaking, impact investing, policy work, and movement building, to help build an inclusive, just and healthy future for everyone.

Our Values

We believe we can help build a future for everyone.

• We aim to be daring, but humble:  We look for bold ideas — regardless of structure and stage — and help them scale by pairing engineers with subject matter experts to build tools that accelerate the pace of social progress.


• We want to learn fast, but build for the long-term: We want to iterate fast and help bring new solutions to the table, but we also realize that important breakthroughs often take decades, or even centuries.


• Stay close to the real problems: We engage directly in the communities we serve because no one understands our society’s challenges like those who live them every day.  

Our success is dependent on building teams that include people from different backgrounds and experiences who can challenge each other's assumptions with fresh perspectives. To that end, we look for a diverse pool of applicants including those from historically marginalized groups — women, people with disabilities, people of color, formerly incarcerated people, people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or gender nonconforming, first and second generation immigrants, veterans, and people from different socioeconomic backgrounds.

The Opportunity

Our work in education is aimed at ensuring that every student — not just a lucky few — can get an education that’s tailored to their individual needs and supports every aspect of their development.  We’re pairing engineering with grantmaking, impact investing, policy, and advocacy work to help every young person enter adulthood with the skills and abilities they need to reach their full potential — and equip every teacher with the tools and research they need to help students get there. 

An example of our work is our partnership with Gradient Learning — a nonprofit that offers the Summit Learning approach to education. This is a personalized education approach developed in partnership with learning scientists, researchers, and academics. Through this approach, students gain the skills, knowledge and habits to succeed in college and enter adulthood with a clear vision for achieving purpose and wellbeing in life.

Our education engineering teams are responsible for improving how:

• Teachers facilitate personalized projects where students can build and demonstrate cognitive skills.


• Students work through content and assessments at their own pace.


• Teachers individualize instruction using real-time data.


• Students work with teacher mentors to develop a growth mindset, emotional intelligence, and self-directed learning skills.


• School leaders, district leaders, and other staff support implementation and teachers’ professional development 

The Notebooks team builds and maintains the in-house document editor of the Summit Learning Platform.  Students complete their assignments in Notebooks, and teachers use the built-in tools to give feedback, exchange resources, and work collaboratively with students to improve their learning.

You will

• Work full-stack and collaborate closely with a cross-functional team to develop on, iterate, and evolve the Notebooks product.


• Design and implement the systems to support a complex product with thousands of users.


• Support platform quality initiatives such as performance, reliability, and accessibility.


• Provide technical guidance and mentoring to junior engineers.

You have

• Strong experience as a web developer shipping complex products end-to-end with minimal guidance (5+ years).


• Experience in frontend development (JavaScript, React a plus).


• Experience in server-side web frameworks (Rails a plus).


• Ability and desire to mentor others in achieving engineering excellence.


• Eagerness to learn and grow as a software engineer.

by via developer jobs - Stack Overflow